Using a fisheye lomo to document and record my daily life. I named my lomo "Bebe", as in South Park's Bebe, as in pronounced "bay-bay".
Click the lomos to enlarge.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Shida University, Taipei, Taiwan

March 10, 2006 - This is what it looks like from the window of my classroom. Except that it's in fisheye view, and Bebe doesn't do well in low light so the exposure isn't great.

The language school at Shida (pronounced shr-da) is the largest Mandarin language school in Taiwan. It was established not long after the Chinese Nationalist Government was kicked off of the mainland by Mao Tse-Tung, and gained control of the island, previously a Chinese province, by massacring thousands of locals and establishing 40 years of martial law. Go team!

It makes me feel a little funny that this school was established partly to promote mainland Chinese hegemony over the island, but the reality is that I think there is a good possibility that in the next 50 years or so, Mandarin Chinese will be the most important language to learn, not English. And I don't see that as a good thing. Just a possible reality.

4 comments:

I haven't come up with anything clever yet, like my response to "What are you going to do with your law degree?" "Probably hang it on the wall". A response would have to imply that I didn't succeed in learning the dang language (I'm having serious doubts). :)